John Cage

Associated Press

Updated: July 28, 2009

By Allan Kozinn

John Cage was a prolific and influential composer whose work influenced the Minimalist movement in art and music. He died on Aug. 12, 1992. From 1970 until his death at 79, he lived with the choreographer Merce Cunningham in their home in New York. Mr. Cunningham died on July 27, 2009.

Mr. Cage, who was also a writer and philosopher, had an impact far beyond the musical world. He was a central influence on the work of the choreography of Mr. Cunningham, whom he had known since they were students at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle. It was Mr. Cage who persuaded Mr. Cunningham to start his own dance company, with which Mr. Cage toured as composer, accompanist and music director. He was also an influence on the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were his friends, and on several generations of performance artists.

In 1989, when the Anthony d'Offay Gallery in London brought together pages from Mr. Cage's 1958 "Concert for Piano and Orchestra," videotape of Mr. Cunningham's choreography and a collection of Mr. Johns's works in a show called "Dancers on a Plane: Cage, Cunningham, Johns," John Russell wrote in The New York Times about Mr. Cage's centrality in this constellation: "There was never a manifesto, a statement of position, a 'momentous' interview. He just does it, and the others do what they do, and in ways that everybody can sense and nobody can quite explain, the interaction of these three has consistently brought about astonishing results."

In the music world, of course, Mr. Cage's influence was extremely far-reaching. He started a revolution by proposing that composers could jettison the musical language that had evolved over the last seven centuries, and in doing so he opened the door to Minimalism, performance art and virtually every other branch of the musical avant-garde. Composers as different in style from one another -- and from Mr. Cage -- as Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Frederic Rzewski have cited Mr. Cage as a beacon that helped light their own paths.

In a career that began in the 1930's, Mr. Cage composed hundreds of works, ranging from early pieces that were organized according to the conventional rules of harmony and thematic development, to late pieces that defied those rules and were composed using what he called "chance" processes.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Cage, his music and his theories of composition have always inspired debate. Traditionalists have dismissed him as a prankster, a charlatan or an anarchist, and although performances of his music take place uneventfully today, there were times in the 1960's when his works evoked angry responses. At a New York Philharmonic performance of "Eclipticalis With Winter Music," in 1964, for example, a third of the audience walked out and members of the orchestra hissed the composer.

"I do what I feel it is necessary to do," he told an interviewer. "My necessity comes from my sense of invention, and I try not to repeat the things I already know about."

Mr. Cage was, in fact, the son of an inventor, and if there is a single thread running through his compositions and books, it is a sense of constant innovation, improvisation and exploration. Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he studied and whose rigorous 12-tone style inhabits an end of the contemporary music continuum opposite the place occupied by Mr. Cage, once described him as "not a composer but an inventor of genius," a quotation that Mr. Cage always said pleased him.

John Milton Cage Jr. was born on Sept. 5, 1912, in Los Angeles, and spent part of his childhood in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Mich., before moving back to California. An entrepreneur from the start, he had his own weekly radio show on KNX in Los Angeles when he was 12 years old. He had started to study the piano by then, and his programs featured his own performances and those by other musicians in his Boy Scout troop. He graduated from Los Angeles High School as class valedictorian.

In 1930, after two years at Pomona College, Mr. Cage went to Paris where he briefly worked for Erno Goldfinger, an architect with ties to Marcel Duschamp and other Dadaists whose work would later influence him. He also threw himself into the study of contemporary piano works he had heard at a performance by the American pianist John Kirkpatrick. He painted and wrote poetry, and it was during a visit to Majorca during this first European sojourn that he composed his first piano pieces.

Eventually, Mr. Cage drifted toward the world of dance. In 1937, he joined the modern dance ensemble at the University of California at Los Angeles as an accompanist and composer, and he formed his own ensemble to play his early percussion works. In 1937, he moved to Seattle, where he worked as composer and accompanist for Bonnie Baird's dance classes at the Cornish School. While in Seattle, he organized another percussion band, collected unusual instruments and toured the Northwest. It was also at this time that he met and began his lifelong collaboration with Mr. Cunningham.

He returned to California in 1938 to join the faculty of Mills College. His works of this period were still fairly conventional, at least by his later standards. But Mr. Cage was also beginning to explore new territory. His "Imaginary Landscape No. 1," composed in 1939, used variable-speed turntables, a muted piano and a cymbal. The next year he wrote his first piece for prepared piano, "Bacchanale."

In 1942, Mr. Cage moved to New York City, which remained his home base thereafter. Soon after he arrived, he undertook his first collaboration with Mr. Cunningham, "Credo in Us," and in the mid-1940's they toured extensively together. In 1947, Mr. Cage was commissioned to write "The Seasons" for the Ballet Society. A graceful, consonant work with a pronounced Indian influence that reflected Mr. Cage's growing interest in Eastern philosophy, "The Seasons" is one of his few scores for traditional symphony orchestra.

His attraction to Eastern philosophy began around 1945, when he began an extensive study of Zen Buddhism at Columbia University, which had a profound and lasting effect on his work.

In 1950, after returning to the United States from a tour of Europe with Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Cage discovered the "I Ching," the Chinese "book of changes" that one consults after tossing a set of coins. This method gave Mr. Cage the idea that lies at the heart of his "chance" compositions.

His major works since the late 1960's include "Hpschd" (1969), a collaboration with Lejaren Hiller for 7 harpsichords, 51 tapes, films, slides and colored lights; "Cheap Imitation" (1969, orchestrated 1972), based on a piece by Satie, which keeps the original rhythmic patterns but replaces this French composer's pitches with notes selected through chance procedures; "Etudes Australes" (1974-5), a virtuoso piano work with a score based on astronomical charts; "Roaratorio" (1979), an electronic piece containing thousands of sounds mentioned in James Joyce's novel "Finnegans Wake," and the five "Europera" works, composed from 1987 to 1991.

Mr. Cage's books include "Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music" (1959), written in collaboration with Kathleen O'Donnell Hoover; "Silence" (1961); "A Year From Monday" (1967); "M" (1973); "Empty Words" (1979), which he also regarded as a performance piece, and read from at this year's Summergarden concerts; "Theme and Variations" (1982); "X" (1983), and "I-IV," a collection of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1988-89.

He also amassed a sizable catalogue of visual works -- photography, monotypes, prints, etchings, paintings and some of his more graphic scores -- from 1969 to 1992.

Chronology of Coverage

Jan. 4, 2014

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim observes that exhibit There Will Never Be Silence at the Museum of Modern Art examines the intersection of John Cage’s seminal music piece 4’33 with the work of contemporaneous visual artists. MORE

Sep. 22, 2012

Steve Smith reviews concert of John Cage and Pierre Boulez compositions, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble as part of the Composer Portraits series at Miller Theater. MORE

Sep. 7, 2012

Anthony Tommasini reviews opening night programs for two festivals celebrating the 100th birthday of composer John Cage; Cage100 is at the Stone performance space in the East Village and John Cage at 100! is part of the New York Chamber Music Festival at Symphony Space. MORE

Aug. 23, 2012

Allan Kozinn reviews performance by the (kaj) Ensemble, presenting an original work by Kevin James to commemorate the centenary of composer John Cage, at the DiMenna Center. MORE

Aug. 12, 2012

John Cage's most famous composition 4'33, often called his 'silent' work, is intended to get audiences to listen to the music inherent in ambient sounds; these John Cage moments can happen anywhere, even on the subway. MORE

Jul. 23, 2012

Ben Ratliff reviews book Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. MORE

Jul. 21, 2012

Allan Kozinn reviews performance by the Flux Quartet as part of Bargemusic's three-concert celebration of composer John Cage's centenary. MORE

Jul. 10, 2012

Allan Kozinn reviews concert of works by John Cage performed by Iktus Percussion at Le Poisson Rouge. MORE

Mar. 24, 2012

Alastair Macaulay reviews revival of dance works by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, featuring Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov and dancers from the now-closed Merce Cunningham Dance Company, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. MORE

Feb. 3, 2012

Allan Kozinn reviews Sounds Reimagined: John Cage at 100, celebration of imaginative composer that is subject of Julliard School's 2012 Focus! Festival. MORE

Jan. 30, 2012

Vivien Schweitzer reviews the first of six concerts in the Focus! 2012 new-music festival celebrating the centennial of composer John Cage's birth, featuring performances by members of the Juilliard School, conducted by Joel Sachs, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater. MORE